
Class JH^ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



GRANITE AND ALABASTER 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lto. 

TORONTO 



GRANITE and ALABASTER 



BY 

RAYMOND HOLDEN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 

All rights reserved 



PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA 



'9^'^tl'^'' 
Q-^^-^^- 



COPTRIQHT, 1922, 

Bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and printed. Published November, 1922. 



di^. 



NOV "i IJ22 

©Gi.AGS6600 



Press of 

1. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



^\^ I 



TO MY WIFE 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Certain of the poems included in this 
volume have appeared in the pages of Poetry 
(Chicago), Contemporary Verse, The Forge, 
The Survey, The Literary Review, The Mid- 
land, The Nation, The Measure, Vanity Fair, 
The Yale Review. Thanks are due the editors 
of those publications for permission to reprint 
in this volume. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Once 13 

Sugaring 14 

The Summit 17 

Lost Wateb 18 

Snow Rain 19 

Borers 20 

Burying Ground 21 

Winter 22 

The Plow 23 

Mountain 24 

Ghostly Retrospect 26 

To the North Wind 27 

Spring Building 30 

Night Above the Tree Line 33 

Firewood 35 

Prospect 36 

Mood 37 

Promontory 38 

The Passenger Pigeon 41 

Fishing 42 

Snow 44 

Winter Fire 45 

Open Windows 48 

The Woodman 49 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Life 50 

Growth 51 

Afteb the Circus 52 

Season's End . 54 

Rock Fowler 55 

After Twenty Years 67 

Memorial 69 

Autumn 1918 70 

February Twenty-second 71 

To the De.\d 72 

Senses 73 

Flesh 74 

Midnight: Battery Park 75 

October 76 

Walt Whitman . 77 

To a Skylark 78 

The Dissembling Look , 79 

Advice 80 

Different Streets 81 

To THE Urbane 82 

Early Flowers 83 

Illusion 84 

The End of March 85 

Paradox 86 

The Ample Cloak 87 

quatorzaine 88 

Passers-by 89 

Longshoreman 92 

Soliloquy 93 

Surrender . 95 



CONTENTS XI 

PAOB 

Shtreing 97 

Bretonnb 98 

Circe 100 

Calypso 101 

Windmill 103 

Widow's Weeds 104 

New Singing 105 

Presence , 107 

Dance 108 

Reach Out 110 

You and I Ill 

Epithalamium 112 

Storm 115 

Nocturne 116 

Words 117 

The Durhams 118 



GRANITE AND ALABASTER 



ONCE 

Once there was silt and gravel everywhere 
And water running in great roaring floods — 
No feet on earth nor wings upon the air 
Nor any green that could have promised buds. 
There was a vast ice precipice withdrawing 
Slower than snails to a glittering cold rest 
About the uncertain pole while waters gnawing 
At rigid rock made room for root and nest. 
Then some ancestral cell now lodged in me 
Went writhing gaily imder the glacier tongue 
Pastured upon a wild uncertainty. 
Now there are men. Life is no longer young. 
Now there is warm flesh and warm vocal breath. 
The only glacier is the shadow of death. 



18 



SUGARING 



A man may think wild things under the night 

In March when there is a tapping within pails 

Hung breast-high on the maples. Then the stars, 

Washed by a wind that all day long 

Lay in the sunny pastures of the thaw, 

Shine like what eyes would be if men were gods. 

Then the trees seem like rootlets sprung from earth 

Into the fertile mold of the black air. 

A man may think wild things under the stars 

In March when gusty ground-winds stretch their veils 

Across deep footprints in the hillside snow. 

He may believe that life is beautiful 

And will outlast all Autumns and all Winters. 

He may believe that his warm body is one 

With rock and root and iron-fingered frost 

And that its happy power is like the sap 

The subject of inevitable rise 

Timed by sure seasons, promised to the skies. 

14 



SUGARING 15 



n 



Look I The mountain shoulders a weight of moon 

Come from the many million miles of night 

To move among these vapors which go up 

And wind among the winds. The brown sap works 

Its foamy bulk over a great log fire. 

Colors of flame light up a man who kneels 

With sticks upon his arm and in his face 

A grimace of resistance to the glow. 

The very world is burning, though it be March, 

With a wild flame which stirs the life of trees 

Here in the vat and the blood in a man's heart. 

Out there among the roots thaw-runnels make 

The only music heard above the sway 

Of branches fingering the falling silver. 

The fierce flames roar and the embers settle down 

Slowly into that darkness which sends a man 

Up and away to sleep a tired sleep 

And dream of dripping from a rotting roof 

Back into sap that once was rid of him. 

ni 

Close the iron doors and let the fire die 

And the faint night-wind blow through the broken walls. 

The sugar thickens and the moon is gone 

And frost threads up the singing rivulets. 

I am going up the mountain toward the stars 



16 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

But I should like to lie near earth to-night, 

Earth that has borne the furious grip of Winter 

And given a kind of birth to beauty at last. 

Earth! The old breath thrills through her once again 

And there will be passion soon, shaking her veins 

And driving her spirit upward till the buds 

Burst overhead and swallows find the eaves 

Of the sugar-house untroubled by the talk 

Of men gone off with teams to mend the roads. 

I think I shall throw myself down here in the snow 

So to be very near her when she stirs — 

Near to the throbbing of this body of hers. 



THE SUMMIT 

Here where a man seems in the grip of hands 

Which reach up out of the indistinct below 

As if to drag him from the place he stands 

Into a blue gulf where the tree-tops flow 

And straighten and ebb the weathered peak is worn, 

As if from too much cleaving of the sky, 

To a crumbling blade whose temper storms have borne 

Down to give breadth to meadows where cows lie. 

So the interminable change goes on 

Always among the most established things. 

The vast snow pinnacles which were here are gone 

Beyond the reach of even eyes or wings 

And man stands on the ridges which remain 

Feeling the earth dissolving in its rain. 



17 



LOST WATER 

It is a doubtful noon under these trees, 

And I am digging in the stony sand 

Among the roots of what a little since 

Were blue and yellow flags and now are pods. 

Deeper and deeper, and the depth is cool 

And forest sounds are soft as a man's breath. 

Old pines have done old apple trees to death 

And stiffening silence is upon them now. 

The sun and I are looking for the sweet 

Quiet waters of the rocky veins of earth 

In leaf and root and where mold-bitten staves 

Remember lips that drank of cups now broken 

And the time when buttercups were mirrored here 

Where now there is a masonry of crusted leaves. 

It is a doubtful noon under the pines 

That press their fingered tops to the low sky, 

A doubtful noon, a doubtful world, and I . . • 



18 



SNOW RAIN 

I am not one to mind the rain when it comes 

Fingering the sinking snow and leaving prints 

Of passage heard to tell from the touch of grass 

Bent by a rabbit's frenzy or the wind. 

Days like to-day there is something very near 

Always upon the point of breaking through. 

Men of the mountain towns in the milk-train 

Quicken the air with tales of leaping deer 

And myths of caribou gone fifty years 

Come back to visions straining beyond sight. 

Something of me goes out into their talk 

For I have lain upon the quiet snow 

Watching for flying feet and listening 

For the murmuring trees to burst with sudden wings, 

And I have felt the drops, as they fall now 

Come down almost in passion for a world 

Made beautiful by the presence of glad men. 

Even now I think there is something very close 

Ready to sweep like rainfall over me, — 

These men, the lingering patterns of the snow, 

The wet that alters them, the purple river, 

I climb upon these things almost to touch 

The beauty of that power I almost know. 

19 



BORERS 

The red-nosed grubs that burrow under bark 

Of pines too old to earn their daily sunlight 

Have come from some place which is very dark 

In the imaginings beyond my eyes. 

I hear them munching in their paradise 

Of many cells steeped in still-running sap. 

I lie half-dozing in the patchy sunlight 

And if it were not for ants I should have a nap. 

But I do not care to think the world is dying 

Slow death from mouth to mouth of things that creep 

Or spread where lack of sun means never drying 

For I am not really sure that now and then 

Some sudden glance of some one among men 

Could fail to find me sullied, no, not sure, — 

Not sure enough to lose the ants and sleep. 

There are only times when earth and I are pure. 



20 



BURYING GROUND 

There is nothing here but the elms for me to speak to 

And so I say, Why do you draw yourselves 

Upward away from these poor planted people 

Who would be forgotten but for their stones? 

Small need I have to ask that of the elms 

For I myself am only passing by 

With the dust and the wind and the seeds of pines, 

Knowing that there is no stone waiting here 

For me to come and burrow under it, 

No stone to mark me different from the elms 

That give the earth to the sky. 



21 



WINTER 

Drowsily, dreamily, the brown boughs 

Mingle and murmur in the breeze 

And the little animals drowse 

And I wonder they do not freeze, 

For nothing moves but is shrill 

With the Winter's clinking song 

And the snow lies deep and the hill 

Gleams where the gusts are strong. 

I have come down from the house 

Which rests on the reaching snow 

To the music of murmuring boughs 

In the footless world I know, 

And to me the cold is a voice 

From earth that would speak to me 

And urge me not to rejoice 

That I am not beast nor tree; 

And to me the warmth of my blood 

Is an answer saying, "I hear," 

And so we are understood 

And so we have nothing to fear 

Though I am a man who dies 

And the earth is like dust in the skies. 

22 



THE PLOW 



I thought the white patch on the Eastern hill 
Was surely snow. I watched it and it stirred, 
And even the drifted uplands lost the chill 
They had been blowing downward and a bird 
Flashed blue and there were others which I heard. 

n 

The patch of snow moved with a man behind it 
And furrows on the hillside rippled brown. 
The Winter went like water from my mind 
And the misty April sun came faintly down 
And I forgot the road which leads to town. 

Ill 

I was not anything but one desire 
To follow in the wake of the billowy blade 
With wind and water and my kind of fir&— 
To cleave the fallow hillside and invade 
Young earth and rise up glad and unafraid. 



23 



MOUNTAIN 

Over the yellow tops of tamaracks 

The dusk floats. Up the valley wild ducks fly 

With light from the gone sun upon their backs. 

Across the torrent, cloaked in purple sky, 
Endowed with the sure silence a man lacks, 
A mountain rises, grave and great and high. 

Oh, Mountain I Island in a sea of change! 

What starry vault of the cathedral air 

Can house the murmurs of those prayers which range 

Up from my blood toward you, who triumph there 
Over the powers which have kept man strange 
To what earth, fire, and wind and water share? 

Sea-currents shifted sands and you were piled 
Above the unbroken shimmer of the sea 
And taking power and person from the wild 

Warm sun, you shook your rocky shoulders free 

And the waters fell and tempests came and filed 

Your great shape to this glory which I see. 

24 



MOUNTAIN 25 

But I, the foundling fire upon your slope, 

Remember nothing of my lineage. 

I have been taught by wandering troops of hope 

And I know nothing. Snow-berry and saxifrage 
Rest tired roots in your heart but my roots grope 
At earth and sun and rain and wind that rage 

And find them all inapprehensible. 

Oh, take me up to your dusk-vaulted walls 

Or fall and silence this loud steeple-bell 

Of shadow-vaulted flesh, this bronze that calls 

To the unguided, unremembering swell 

Of a lost air through which a lost star falls! 



GHOSTLY RETROSPECT 

Through spruces lightened by a flash of birch 

Foot over foot soft toe-pads patter down. 

Grim little beasts go silently in search 

Of birds whose odors linger though they have flown. 

Even the sun is stealthy as it falls 

Down through the darkness and the wind seems full 

Of spectral breaths from the kind of life which calls 

To the hungry mouse and the towering horned bull. 

I walk on stones in the shadow of steel and glass 

But I remember earth as it once was, 

So that the look of men and girls that pass 

These eyes which feed what senses a man has 

Is animately strange, as if it were sight 

Of sleek beasts slinking through a jungle night. 



26 



TO THE NORTH WIND 



No wash of the twelve-silvered earth's long flight, 

No frosty fury warring with sun gold 

Brings you to blow from the black-breasted night 

Wind of the North I Tide of this sea of birch 1 

You are the rich, uncoveted delight 

Given to those mad men who madly hold 

Close to their hearts throughout their short-houred search 

That faithful fire which keeps them from the cold 

Of meshy lanes through which the planets lurch. 

n 

By night, when the inevitable shade 

Climbs from our roofs up cloud-stairs zenithward 

And hangs in heavy sweeps from blade to blade 

Of many-sworded stars, with you at heart 

I wander from the waterside parade 

Through a silence of small alleys, window-starred. 

The cobbles speak to me, lamp fingers part 

Shadows like veils. I whom my reasons guard 

From swift surprise look up toward you and start. 

27 



28 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

ni 

Drawn by your presence flowing in the air, 
Urged by the ancient mission of my veins 
I enter the last door. A radiance there 
Bright as the loveliest planet of the seven 
Disarms the sad mask of the sense I wear, 
Leaps from the stillness of the place and strains 
My body to its beauty. A glad heaven 
Dawns in the dusk, dispels the mind's black pains 
And fills me with more fire than fills suns even. 

IV 

Then the auroral prominences fade, 

Lifting their roots from out my burning breast, 

Folding their flames that seared the senseless shade 

Behind my eyes. Then I arise and go. 

Far overhead the planet undismayed 

Swims with slow splendor toward its heavenly West. 

I from the happy regions where you blow 

Fall downward, desolate and dispossessed, 

Into those ways which there are none below. 



Lean downward from your station in the sky, 
Beloved Beauty! Sweet Crepuscular 
Young Goddess of the silver-passioned eye! 
Lean down and touch me, take me if you will ! 



TO THE NORTH WIND 29 

I am a wanderer, a strange passer-by. 

You with your young-mouthed laughter want a star. 

I am a wanderer gathering coals to fill 

A dead star-body. I have wandered far. 

Here is my orbit ended, on this hill. 

VI 

Forgive me the futility of hands. 
Forgive me the lit fires that have gone cold, 
Forgive me this frail skeleton that stands 
Against the sky, the shadows it keeps making! 
You who are regent of what man commands 
When beauty's torture drives him to be bold, 
Forgive him the brief loves his life keeps taking 
To save the want of you from growing old! 
Forgive his senseless tears and his soul's aching! 



SPRING BUILDING 



At noon the sound of hammering dies and wind 
Scatters loose shingles from the untended gable. 
The carpenter at the door-frame, grizzle-skinned 
And gaunt, spits brown as far as he is able. 
He steps across the mud upon a stone 
Where, with an elbow and an arm at rest, 
He sits, half quiet. He is not alone. 
I watch him as he leans against the West. 



n 

Not from the carpenter, but from the things 
Men never know of men I look away. 
And where I look a massive mountain flings 
Dark rocky fingers tipped with rosy gray 
Up through its snowy mantle at a sky 
Steeled to a perfect temper of keen blue. 
The breath of a thin wind blows faintly by, 
More warm, more lovely now than hitherto. 
Not so much at the peak as at the things 
I know of it I look through the noon ease, 

30 



SPRING BUILDING 31 

Made wistful by near songs and nearer wings 
And runnels of singing water and sighs from trees. 
Not sharply, but through distances and veils 
I wonder at what earth's elements arrange; 
The rock, the tree, the flesh and blood that fails. 
I wonder where in this evolving change 
I stand that life burns so in breast and limb. 
I wonder, and in the wake of wonder fear 
Comes with its rapture to that mind, grown dim 
With safety which so blindly led me here. . . . 
Here where the forest waits its time for falling 
And mountains feed their power to little streams 
And after dark the hungry beasts go calling 
And last year's leaves lie rotting in sun-beams. 

Ill 

Now I stretch out my arms in ravishment, 
Or would but for the near-by carpenter, 
Toward that old mountain in devout dissent 
From too much human triumph, too much stir 
Of the absurd infinitesimal 
Before my eyes. I stretch out eager arms 
At least in spirit, and the great ice-fall 
Which once lay thick above these valley farms 
Seems like a living thing, and the vast sea 
Whose silty shifting piled these pinnacles 
Heaves once again in deep tides over me 
Sweeping strange pain with passionate old swells 



32 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Up from my heart to islands in my eyes. 
Now I submit to what I ahnost know 
And laugh in hope of being so made wise 
Because I too survived that long ago 
Gestation and am now a man who hires 
Others to raise my walls and lay my sills 
And bring me food and scuttle out my fires 
Under the watchful silence of these hills. 



NIGHT ABOVE THE TREE LINE 



You berries that are full of the dark dusks 
Of mountains and the moisture of chill dews, 
Swell on your stems and break your ripened husks 
For lips which it would wither you to lose — 
If there are lips to what is wandering here 
Feeling you underfoot in the rocky night, 
Moving about like wind, blowing you clear 
Of mists, hanging your leaves with drops of light. 



n 



Listen! There is a sound of water falling 

Down the dark shafted night into the trees. 

Wild birds that should be quiet now are calling. 

How shall I sleep to-night, troubled with these? 

The cool wind through the moon's invisible strings 

Blows like a striking of clear silver bars; 

The great black peak shudders and leaps and swings 

And I am blinded by the fall of stars. 

33 



34 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

m 

I cannot rest. I cannot quiet my limbs. 
A sense of climbing keeps my body burning 
And the white flame sweeps over me and dims 
All that inclines within me toward returning. 
Did I see only earth once long ago 
And only flesh in faces turned to me? 
Sleep? Rest? With my senses shaken so 
And the world's valleys lost so dizzily? 



IV 

Why have I come so near the fearful stars 
When what is in me is so much a want 
Of utter dark too thick for any wars 
Of flesh and spirit dazzlingly to haunt? 
I do not know. I do not want to know ; 
Only to make a fire of weariness 
And fling myself upon it and burn and go 
Thinly, like smoke, to wind-walled quietness. 



FIREWOOD 

The glittering crescent of my blade 

Is stuck with juices of the tree: 

There is the wound which I have made, 

There are the dark boughs over me. 

I swing the axe. The cones are shaken 

And the shuddering tree begins to come 

With ripping shrieks which might awaken 

The gorged fox in his hidden home. 

My blood is brightened and my eyes 

Are blurred with flashes of a fire 

That leaps like wind and only dies 

When I have cut what I require. 

The fresh chips falling in the snow 

Have something for the sunny wind 

Which rose a little while ago 

In the old spruce forest I have thinned, 

And I whose cheeks can feel it blow 

Rest aching hands upon my axe 

And have a desperate wish to know 

What kind of flame my chimney lacks . . . 

Why covet skeletons for food 

To keep a man from stiffening 

With cold not made to chill the blood 

Of fox's foot or bird's wing. 

35 



PROSPECT 

The eagle hangs so close I see a stir 

Of ragged feathers fronting the strong wind 

And in the blue beyond where my limbs were 

This very morning, colors strangely thinned 

With downward distance which are intervals 

Full of green stands of grass and pastures cropped 

By much diminished cattle, threads of walls 

And shiny runs of streams that seem to have stopped. 

Only the steady eagle is above me 

Hanging in the wind that goes blowing by. 

It is as if the earth were trying to shove me 

Like a finger upward into the tall sky. 

And I could be the finger but for a strange 

Disturbing taciturnity in the mass 

Of living forest, a silence in the change 

Of light across it where cloud shadows pass 

Which seems to mean, What can a man point out, 

A man whose blood is watered so with doubt? 



36 



MOOD 

Some things make issue of the loveliest hours 
And mar the lightest leisure. These are dead. 
White wings of evening fold among the flowers 
And winds attach me to them. I am led 
Up where the birches shake in the sun's glow 
And hemlocks watch their wavy shadows grow. 

I am forgotten. The lit solitude 
Effaces all my lineaments and name. 
Life is among my limbs, and where I stood 
Stands an unbodied rapture gone to flame. 
Some things make issue of attained desire. 
I do not know nor heed them. I am fire. 



37 



PROMONTORY 



On rocky islands half at sea 

The derelict waters in a windy glare 

Crash and are broken and drip dazzlingly. 

The green kelp swirls like drowning hair 

Lifting and falling with the tide. 

The surf has a motion which shadows ride 

As tree-boughs ride the air. 

Shadows of cliff and shadows of cloud 

Rise and fall with the sea 

And wild winds heavy and loud 

Clutch downward fearfully. 

Against the earth a loom of waves and a whirr 

Of sea-fowl banked like mist. 

Against the sky a streaming stir 

Of earth-blown clouds that belly and twist. 

n 

Man with his basket hunting nests 

Moves through the high-tide spray 

And the gulls with their stone-gray breasts 

Flutter and glide away 

38 



PROMONTORY 39 



And the crossing shadows of their wings 
Melt in the gullies and the moss. 
What is it that in a man's heart sings 
When the shadows cross? 
When overhead the many million cries 
Break loose from blood and bone 
And the sea seethes toward the skies 
And the crevice flowers are blown? 
Man with his basket, hunting eggs, 
Goes clambering with hands and legs 
Over the rocks by the shore 
In search of food, in want of more. 



in 

On rocky islands half at sea 

The derelict waters rise and fall 

Close fettered to their flow and never free 

And the great sea of air from which birds call 

Struggles within the limits of the wind 

And the great world of stone and sand 

And brown earth blown and thinned 

Clings to its globe with many a rocky hand, 

And birds of blowing wind invade 

Dark waters, swift as falling stars, 

For fish that swarm the weedy bars 

Wide-eyed and afraid. 

Men with their baskets hunting nests 

Move through the high tide spray 



40 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Taking the wind and the mist to their breasts, 
Frightening birds away. 



IV 

What is it that in a man's heart sings 

When, with the thundering sea in his ears 

And the breath of the great sky shrieking of fears 

And the sharp earth bruising his feet, he brings 

His basket over the cliffs and home 

To mouths too sure that he will come? 

Man the hunter of birds and beasts 

That in their hunger hunt their kind 

And crouch in their rock-homes over feasts— 

A man's heart sings, but what of his mind? 

How shall he know what it means to be 

Master of wing and master of sea? 

How shall he know, who has better than claws 

To tear red flesh for hungry maws 

Why he walks erect while the fox runs low? 

Why he remains when the sea-birds go? 

How shall he know why life goes around 

Its circle above and underground 

Through sea and sky, in flood and gale 

Through feather and foot and fin and tail? 

How shall he know man's destiny? 

What shall he think himself to be? 

How shall he walk by the strength of the sea 

And hide his withered certainty? 



THE PASSENGER PIGEON 

The dead and gone are not so ancient now 

That there is no fluttering of their wild wings heard. 

Still living travelers still remember how 

They darkened long days' journeys when they stirred 

By millions from woods broken by their wings 

And how the beat and bustle of their quests 

Shut out the sound of all earth's other things 

And the ground was soft with feathers from their breasts. 

Now they are gone, even to the last lone pair, 

And men who never knew them go their ways 

With equal clamor and an equal air 

Of riding in the saddle of docile days. 

This that is like a street is like a wood 

Broken by famished wings grown fierce for food. 



41 



FISHING 

Down the white water and the dark pool 

Over the rocks the wind blows and the songs 

Of birds with only half-discovered names 

Wait for the wind in places which are cool. 

How should I know whether the earth belongs 

To me or I to earth when all the claims 

We have on one another are blown away 

And masks fall from the faces of all things 

Strangely and suddenly and the light of day 

CHmbs back to heaven in cloud-stepped clamberings? 

I have come for a man's reason with hook and line 

To trouble the swift water under the stones 

Where wise trout flash their darkness, but as the wind 

Blows warm through bodies of great trees, through mine 

A passion blows, burning my very bones 

And making flame of the dust that is in my mind. 

This then, instead of fishing, is an hour 

Of being one with earth, as if her quiet 

Had taken the shape for which a young life aches 

In heart and mind, as if for leaf and flower 

There were half-hidden limbs and for the riot 

Of river water such riot as blood makes 

In flesh that touches beauty long desired 

42 



FISHING 43 



And for the song of birds a whispering 
From cool lips wet like petals and inspired 
With needless music, for the wandering 
Of shadow-footed clouds an altering 
Of shadows in the brain, a moving on 
Of darkness into seasons long, long gone. 



SNOW 



Last night a brooding cloud 
Of undecided mist 
Lay on the mountain pasture 
And the brooks were loud. 

Now running waters lie 
Faint as far bells 
Under a soft white silence 
And the birds ask why. 



44 



WINTER FIRE 



Neither the moon beyond the sill 

Nor any flaming of this fire 

Touches at all. The night is still. 

The last spruce lifts a shadowy spire; 

And there are stars. They may be shaking — 

Lurching through orbits mad with storm — 

But light from them comes faintly breaking 

Against the world and is not warm. 

Everything seems far away. 

Even my heart, so wildly beating, 

Seems as remote as yesterday 

And all its sea of life retreating 

In ripples from a littered beach 

Not even waves can any longer reach. 

n 

Oh, false, false world of shamefaced solitude I 
Cold house of shell I carry like a snail! 
If I should rise and rush into the wood 
Would you rise up and follow me or fail? 

45 



46 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

There the white body of the moon lies bare, 

Bathed by the shining stream of many a star 

And if I hasten I shall find her there, 

Her silver limbs looped in what winds there are. 

What would it be if I were not afraid 

To know t^at her beauty sheathes a bitter blade 

Tempered by terror whitened to delight? 

Would you dissolve and yield me to the night? 



in 

Too much afraid of even the star's fire 

I have too long sat watching. The flame falls, 

And happy heralds of unwise desire 

Beat with their hands and heart-beats at my walls. 

I hear the tongues of many vivid trees 

In mouths of the mysterious dusk go crying 

At doors and windows which converge on these, 

My body's channels, that should be replying. 

How can you hold me dumb, you strange chill thing? 

How can your icy roots invade a heart 

Taught by wild voyages to climb and sing 

Nearest the sun where all heart burnings start? 

IV 

What matter? Fling aside the doors 
And let the snow come rushing in. 
Drift it deep upon the floors. 



WINTER FIRE 47 



Pile it high where I have been! 
I shall rise and strip me bare 
And tear the snow- veils from the West. 
They are warm enough to wear, 
They have wrapped the moon's breast. 
They are lovely I They will thaw 
Rivers frozen in my veins, 
Seas for tidal stars to draw. 
Lakes for suns to suck for rains. 
I shall wear the snowy mist 
And with strength I never had 
Leap and lie down, fiercely kissed, 
By the stranger and be glad. 



OPEN WINDOWS 

The grackle in the pavement tree 
Creaks news of Northward airs 
And human voices come to me 
By other ways than stairs. 

The curtains stir in winds that touch 
Like ministering hands; 
The murmurings of Spring are such 
One almost understands. 



48 



THE WOODMAN 

Who is the dark, deep-chested fool 
That tends my body's hearthstone 
And will not let the red bricks cool? 
Who can he be that walks alone 
Through forests in my mountain heart 
Piling the great logs in his cart? 

All through the night I lie and hear him 

Felling wonderful tall trees. 

His tread is heavy and I fear him, 

Yet by the gleam he furnishes 

I read the writing on the wall 

Traced by his shadow, dark and tall. 



4g 



LIFE 

In crotchy trees the worms weave 
A dreadful house of gray 
And there they live by no one's leave 
To writhe the hours away. 

And there they spin their silences 
Hour after quiet hour 
Unseen, unheard, in happy trees 
Busy with fruit and flower. 

Until one Summer a tree lacks 
Green leaves to look upon 
The farmer with his final axe 
Finds all its young heart gone. 



50 



GROWTH 

Long, long ago a host of wonders were 

Articulate about me — little birds 

In branches bright with bloom, the happy words 

Of waters falling, the unceasing stir 

Of windy oaks against the ancient sky, 

Blue gentians growing in unshadowed places. 

Green willows and quiet cows and farm-boys' faces, 

Loud wagons on the highway rolling by, — 

All these were part of something I have lost 

Among new, breathless hours grown heavily 

Tumultuous, that will not let me see 

Through other windows than these white with frost 

Of too much Winter, the impassioned light 

Which once gave things I met with their delight. 



51 



AFTER THE CIRCUS 

I can remember how the memory 
Of fat-hipped women and strong chalky horses 
And men in red and gold hung heavily 
From rafters in my eyes, how other forces 
Recruited among peanuts and popped corn 
Marched in my middle. I remember now 
A miserable sense of having worn 
Too small a hat, so that my dizzy brow 
Reeled in the settling dust behind the mare 
From town to home along the river breezes 
Inflamed by blasts of trumpets and the glare 
Of white lights hanging among high trapezes. 
Yet, for relief, I have still more in mind 
How a great bird I never hoped to see 
With wings like winds of storm that beat me blind 
Flew up and startled both the mare and me. 
So great the power of its sudden flight 
The very day was altered and my brain 
Burst from its bonds and followed the sloped light 
On through the maples to the bird again. 
And then the look of clowns and the blare of brass 
Was gone and something came to the road's edge 

52 



AFTER THE CIRCUS 53 

And the breath of it blew petals to the grass 

And it took me in its arms and sang a pledge 

I have not yet forgotten into me. 

So much for circuses or for any event. 

The coming away is the reality. 

The coming to one's self is what is meant. 



SEASON'S END 



This is the end of the Summer. 
This is the end of all. 
The sap is running back into earth 
And the red leaves shudder and fall. 

If I could shake myself down 
From the stem that has ceased to flow, 
Would there be a cool dark earth to close 
Round the things I have come to know? 



54 



ROCK FOWLER 



A weary man with Winter in his eyes 

Though it is but September by the skies 

Leans on his axe and rests. The afternoon, 

Clear blue above but for a visible moon, 

Touches the hills with lips and leaning breasts 

Such as a man imagines, when he rests, 

To approach the burning body of his dream. 

Over the West there is a fiery gleam. 

The rosy mountain seems to ride a sea 

Of valley shadow rippled with mystery. 

Among the scant limbs of young tamaracks 

A weary man leans on his weathered axe. 

A passer-by upon the stony road 

Calls from a creaking of malodorous load. 

The wind stirs in a skeleton of maple 

With fingers full of voices. A loose staple 

Falls from a withered fence-post. A horse neighs. 

A distant window catches the sun's blaze. 

Earth, with its contours and ineffable hues 

Seems to burst upward, undeterred by shoes. 

And enter into the mind of him who stands 

55 



56 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

At sullen ease with an axe-helve in his hands ; 

And what the winds can see behind his eyes 

Is doubt, even terror, burning ember-wise — 

Doubt of the solemn silence and the wonder 

Of this sure earth and the dome it travels under; 

As if his thirty years had played him false, 

Fed him with fear of things beyond his walls, 

Stolen the strong laughter which could kill misgiving 

And frozen the heart that fills the brain with living. 

Rock Fowler is as free as wild things are 

Of all but the fear of reaching for a star, 

But there come moments to men so made free 

When man seems an impossible thing to be; 

When in a moment's rest from opiate work 

Gray spiders crawl from places where they lurk 

Across unsettled leaves, as fatefully 

As ever dramatist sent mystery 

To shadow settled things with shapes of meaning 

And set the tower certainty to leaning. 

So to a man half busy with green posts 

A minute's rest is a minute full of ghosts — 

Of fox-fires in the spirit's twilight bogs — 

Ghosts that rise up within him from the logs 

He has left lying in the path of peace 

And from old roots whose bleeding will not cease. 

Safe from the penetrating eyes of men 

The trees seem subtle spies. What then? What then? 

What is a man to do and where to go? 

What trees may learn soon even dust will know. 



ROCK FOWLER 57 

There was this morning when an old tramp strode 

Drunk as a goatfoot satyr down the road 

Wearing a feather in his ruined hat. 

Now when he rests Rock Fowler thinks of that. 

He lifts his axe and swings so bitterly 

That dead twigs shower from the doomed young tree. 

And yet the great tap-root of torturing doubt 

Still clutches earth and sucks much power out. 

Rock drops his axe again and wipes his brow 

And wonders what the tramp is doing now 

And why the comic spectacle, being gone, 

Still fills his mind like something to be done 

Which frightened voices warn him of and cry, 

"Life is a hurt. Avoid its avid eye!" 

The pine trees shiver with a sudden sigh 

And rosy clouds range up the Eastern sky. 

The ground leaves rustle and a sweet shrill bird 

Blows silver and far off and faintly heard 

A grouse booms and small squirrels crash through seas 

Of drifted leaf at ebb tide among trees. 

Rock takes his axe and wanders toward his shack 

Half fearing lest the tramp be coming back 

To storm the citadel of his reserve 

By being something he should have to serve. 

He hurries clumsily along the road 

As if he were a horse which terror strode 

And gripped and guided with relentless knees 

Toward what it is that no man ever sees. 

No print but pressure of the footless wind 



58 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Flattens the grasses at his door. Behind 

The blistered panes no things but shadows loom. 

Nothing but silence paces the muffled room. 

Rock enters and starts echoes from the floor. 

He flings his axe in the corner by the door 

And lights the stove and stretches out his hands. 

A shaft of vanishing sun strikes where he stands 

Through the blue stove-smoke. He averts his eyes, 

Afraid of what that sunlight might surprise. 



n 

A leaf moves in the wind from shade to shade 

And timid trees withdrawn into themselves 

Whisper and worry. Winter has thrust a blade 

Through creviced branches and their nested shelves 

Trying the way to go. The watchful rabbit 

Is changing coats with something hopefully, 

As if the fox could never change his habit 

Of looking for what rabbits used to be. 

A short rod from the upper pasture, black 

As water gathered in unfathomed pools, 

There is a clump of spruce whose limbs drop back 

And touch the mold so that the breath which cools 

Their shadows buries their fingers with a drift 

Of leaves and needles and the ground-vines weave 

Above and under them and light ferns lift 

Faces they cover with a sweep of sleeve. 

Safe in this dark the gathered grouse sit sleeping 



ROCK FOWLER 59 

Sure that for birds there is nothing else to do, 

That hostile beasts with limits to their leaping 

Such as could lose them grapes must lose grouse too. 

A leaf moves and there comes a sudden scrape 

Of strong wings moving against flaky bark, 

Then silence. Then the tree-tops take on shape 

And visibly move across the upper dark 

To the measures of the wind. There comes a chatter 

Of squirrels shaking in their strange red rage 

Aware of something ominous in the patter 

Of needles upon leaves grown shrill with age. 

Now it is lighter out beyond the trees 

Than the cock grouse who stands on a spruce root 

As motionless as stone. A rabbit sees 

The shadowed shape and halts with lifted foot. 

Then something on the wind or in the light 

Infusion of the dawn dissolves their fear. 

The rabbit drops and hurries out of sight 

And the grouse, siu-e no danger can be near, 

Lifts a slow foot and struts with neck and breast 

In search of sunlight or a fall of seeds 

Under a beech tree somewhere, or in quest 

Of safe dark limbs for future roosting needs. 

Suddenly from his peace among the ferns 

The bird starts up and away with a burst of wings. 

Is it the changing East which suddenly burns 

With naked sun that makes him think of things? 

Or is it something in that mossy hollow 

Still dark with shadow, too like the ghostly dread 



60 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Birds have of power which their wings must follow 

Eventually to the level of the dead? 

Something in black and gray like a fallen tree 

Yet nothing like a tree because of a hand 

Full stiffly of dried moss which used to be 

Part of a green where lichen trumpets stand 

Delicately now at the foot of a sloped beam 

Of morning sun on the billowed floor. ... Is this 

The source of that which forces winds to seem 

Awful and anguished? And if not what is? 

How shall the forest know, when suddenly 

The moment passes and the stately bird 

With grave feet and high-throated dignity 

Returns to the diligence his fear deferred? 

How shall the forest tell, the forest which only 

Speaks through its moving boughs and cracking twigs 

Its usual throats of creatures fierce and lonely 

Its noise of crisp leaves dancing gusty jigs? 

Or if it does, how shall the great grouse know 

"Who mounts a log and spreads his splendid tail 

And the ruffle at his throat, meaning to show 

Through beauty the worthy wonder of the male? 

He faces to the East and then to the West 

As if there were some pattern in his brain 

Of certain gestures, lifts his vivid breast 

As once he did in April in the rain 

For inattentive hens who turned their backs. 

At a pose his prancing stops, his plumage settles. 

He is quiet a moment while some far branch cracks 



ROCK FOWLER 61 

And a late aster bends its pallid petals. 

Nothing approaches. Up go pointed wings 

To touch their tips above his delicate crown. 

A strong stroke downward and the aster swings 

More widely, and then up and again down 

Faster and faster thumping the slow air 

Till the forest booms and rasps with scraping bark 

And leaves which lay in a tense stillness there 

Leap up and scatter in many a windy arc. 

It seems almost as if the tree-tops drew 

More vivid circles across the upper sky 

Because of what these frantic wing-tips do 

To shake the trunks which twigs are anchored by. 

Even when the boom of the last beat is done 

And the bird struts again and silence floods 

Mixed with the merry yellow of fresh sun 

Back through the meshy branches of these woods 

An echo of that strange strong drumming beats 

Somewhere among the winds to measure time 

Until new rise and fall of wings repeats 

Its meaning and the cadence of its rhyme. 

So while the shadow of the forest falls 

Continually nearer to its piers, 

The great cock at unmeasured intervals 

Utters his mystery and far-off ears 

Keep hearing dimly and half wondering 

Perhaps in terror, and sharp breezes blowing 

Keep weaving the sound into the songs they sing 

With the call of crows and the sound of water flowing. 



62 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

If there is any hen that hears him now 
She does not come nor even know his meaning. 
From where she perches on her sweep of bough 
She has an eye for nothing but the gleaming 
Of pine seeds shaken by squirrels from their cones 
And beech-nuts bursting from three-cornered burrs. 
Perhaps she wonders why he shakes his bones 
With passion which blows no sign of spark in hers. 
No matter. He keeps rolling at his drum 
Till suddenly, to silence listening, 
Sounds other than of grouse or squirrel come 
Other than even the creak of a crow's wing. . . . 
Strange sounds of moving, not as creatures stir 
Over soft moss and needles or under a limb. 
But entering the world of feather and fur 
Like sense of death grown audible and grim. 
The stately bird folds his gray wings and leaps 
Swiftly down to the ground and is lost in the tangle 
Of twig and fern and a flight of others sweeps 
Up and away at many a sudden angle 
To safer windfalls where uneasily 
They sit and watch with wide-eyed earnestness 
Far shadows where the fearful thing may be 
Half wishing they might dare to fear it less. 
Nearer it comes. A strange enormous tread 
Snapping green boughs that lie across its path 
And shattering stiffened branches of the dead 
In sullen strides of imminence and wrath. 
Nearer and nearer. . . . Past the gullied hollow 



ROCK FOWLER 63 

Where cold, clear water drips like melted moons. 

Nearer . . . And a loud tide seems to follow . . . 

Nearer . . . And overhead strange music croons. 

Then at the other side of an old clearing 

The great thing towers and the sloped sun glistens 

On something in its arms. A rabbit fearing 

Mad heart-beats more than this stands up and listens. 

Up goes the gleam and then a peal of thunder 

Bursts into smoke and bold broad wings that drummed 

Music from winds and made the whole world wonder 

Flap faintly till their last hope has succumbed 

And they no longer stir light leaves to leap 

Nor shoot the body's arrow from their bow. 

They fall unfolded into depths of sleep 

Colder and vaster than warm lives ever know. 



m 

Rock Fowler, with his teeth set like a vise, 

Watches the dead bird with ferocious eyes. 

A wing-tip shudders. He lifts up his gun 

And blasts the quivering thing. The echoes run 

Once more among dark ledges of the trees 

Engulfing silence in a tide of breeze. 

Man with his shot has won the forest world. 

Nothing survives the heavy danger hurled 

From shouldered steel, not even the strong-winged grouse 

King of this region of sun-mottled boughs. 

Dun feathers scatter. The king stirs no longer. 



64 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Man and bird have met and man is stronger. 

Rock leaps a log and reaches for his prey, 

Then stops, goes white, and snatches his hand away. 

He gropes for foothold on a brink of fear 

Which makes him struggle back yet holds him near 

Where the dead grouse in stiffening repose 

Points with the clutching fist of his strong toes 

At other death dissolving in forest mold 

With help of those swift ants who have and hold 

The outer crust of earth and are the link 

Between dark depths to which their tunnels sink 

And heavens full of birds that swoop and feed 

On many a march of their black antlered breed. 

Rock drops his gun and pendulous terror swings 

This way and that across his mind like wings. 

And the blood rushing back into his brain 

Kindles his eyes and lights the thing again. 

He steps a little nearer as if afraid 

Of what his tread set echoing down the glade. 

He looks into the eyes in which the stir 

Of spruce-crowns across sky is but a blur 

Of thickening motion and knows who it is 

Whose body lies there at the foot of his. 

And he remembers what the body said 

But yesterday, and how last night in bed 

The memory lay beside him like a snake 

Invisible and large and kept awake 

To choke his skull with coils of chilly black 

And writhe its moist tail up and down his back. 



ROCK FOWLER 65 

Now that great serpent is at large once more 

Here, amidst tranquil root and squirrel-store. 

Rock bends to see, to touch if he should dare, 

The fearful human thing stretched lifeless there. 

All the high spirit of the million years 

Of man's ascension through the flesh he wears 

To what he is among the untutored beasts — 

The crowned mind busied with more things than feasts, 

The red heart rich with many a happy beat, 

The shrewd swift fingers and adventurous feet — 

All these have gone to make this broken one 

Who shudders beside another in the sun. 

He sees, as no small brain of any bird 

Or any crawling beast man ever heard 

Whistling or howling ever yet could see. 

Not only a dead man but things to be — 

Strange shadows of this death projected on 

Through days no animal is sure will dawn. . . . 

Shadows across Rock Fowler's frantic wandering 

From house to hill, strange echoes in his pondering 

Of simple meanings, things a man must meet 

And have a solvent for or taste defeat 

And go forever outlawed from all ease, 

Frightened by mice and terrified by trees. 

He sees these things which beasts could never see 

And so is not a beast, for beasts are free 

Of all that crashing in the wake of mind 

Which comes to shatter the small peace men find. 

So a man stands beside another dead 



66 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

And out of tumult in a troubled head 

Distils a fiery fear and out of fear 

A bulk of black bewilderment drawn near. 

It shakes him as an axe-blow shakes a tree 

And as the chips fall, so fall heavily 

Hewn fragments of the bole a man's blind cells 

By slow accretion build, through which there wells 

Upward, like sap sublimed from subtle earth, 

Into the mind what makes and mars its worth. 

But far unlike a tree Rock Fowler falls 

And like no shriek of branches are the calls 

He tries to utter with lips full of leaves. 

The earth gives and the patient earth receives. 

The man who feared is without fear again 

And valid now. A fox comes from his den 

And sniffs the sullied air and lifts his throat 

To rattle warning. Two great hawks that float 

Too high for shadow utter their shrill cries 

And look through dwarf trees where a dead grouse lies 

Beside a leafy heap, where black ants pom* 

From root to root across the piney floor 

Busy transferring to devoted dust 

By foot and fang, inspired with frantic lust, 

The wanderer elements returning blind 

From high adventure in the living mind 

Where they made men who could not learn to live. 

Open, you Earth, and take what men can give! 



AFTER TWENTY YEARS 

189&-1918 

The little hill this side the sun 
Is piteously gray. 
Its crevices no longer know 
The feet of yesterday. 

Loud mimicry of desperate war 
With friends who stood for Spain 
Is gone from these unaltered rocks 
And will not come again. 

Those gray victorious bows are gone 
Which once we saw return 
Midst whistles and resounding guns 
From seas where noondays bum. 

The little boys whose laughter leaped 

To see them pass the piers, 

Are lost to love for ships of war 

Deep under twenty years. 
67 



68 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Yet they have put their hearts away 
And risen from the hours, 
And some there are who ride the skies 
And some who sleep with flowers. 

And some remain, whose hearts are mute 
On lips that may not sing. 
Who wonder at the death of friends, 
At battles and at Spring. 



MEMORIAL 

Oh, Countrymen! What tears do we require 
Who in the sight of uncreated suns, 
Leaping brief lengths of lives from dust to dust. 
Pause here to grieve that sap no longer runs 
The tall stalks of young bodies one time thrust 
Up through the flesh of women wanting sons? 
How shall we save from earth's engulfing crust 
The earthen body emptied of its fire? 

If we must weep may ours be bitter tears 
Called from the springs of body-bounded wells 
To celebrate in sadness the rich dread 
Of being wide-eyed children lost in the dells 
Of forests tall as stars. Then let the dead 
With ropes of wind ring warnings from harebells 
For us, the wandering unshepherded, 
Left to the wolfish mercy of our years. 



69 



AUTUMN 1918 

Lately the apples of a burdened bough 
Were gathered from their place of withered grass, 
Lately the stubble where the crows are now 
Uplifted stalks in many a tasselled mass, 
Lately the winds blew softly by coiled vines 
Where now a white frost rims the harrow-lines. 

Autumn again, and with a graver gray 
Among the shuddering branches of still trees . 
Eyes cannot see the leaves fall and be gay, 
Thinking of fields more desolate than these; 
Thinking of voices quieter than things dead 
For the brief time that snow lies overhead. 



70 



FEBRUARY TWENTY-SECOND 

Suppose one never heard of Valley Forge, 
And Washington were nothing but a name 
Cut in the rock of some Virginian gorge 
Where never anything but swallows came. 

Suppose December on the Delaware 
Had never known that bleeding, swift retreat. 
To-day would be a day as others are 
With less of colored bunting in the street. 

And nothing would be absent from these trees 
Which wait their changing, and the starling's song 
Would be as happy and as harsh as these 
Shrill notes the gray wind blows along. 

And the careless music of fast-melting snows 
Would ripple in the gutters and be gone, 
And crocuses would follow, and the rose 
Return, and the world go on. 



71 



TO THE DEAD 



NEW year's eve 



We have not kept the faith, and will you know? 

Under the cold calm of unhappy snow 

Troubled by feet that still have ways to go? 

We have not matched your enterprise 

We have not dared to put earth from our eyes. 

Forgive us, you who have the earth for skies. 

The new year leaps from the black bones of the old 

Into a gala night of manifold 

Whistles and bells and gay hearts warm in the cold. 

We have the torn world to let fall or lift, 

We, who steal hot-eyed glances at the shift 

Of passionate shoulders and the burning drift 

Of flesh-fires among fellow celebrants. 

Forgive us you whose flesh is done with wants. 

We are too much our own inhabitants. 



72 



SENSES 



Men and women speak their words for Heaven, 
I see them holding out their tambourines. 
Senses are only five — If they were seven 
I wonder if we should know what Heaven means. 

I have a mind to ask, why follow them? 
I have a mind to ask what news they have 
Of flowers vanished from the shaken stem, 
What news of God this side of the grave? 

I have them all, touch, sight, speech, smell and hearmg 
And yet I cannot tell what thing is here 
Beneath this weight of flesh which I am wearing, 
Nor what the heaven is which it draws near. 



73 



FLESH 



I am the maker of the shadow 
With me the waters of the pond are dark 
Waters of jonquil and willow 
Waters of drifting cloud. 

It is I who take the light 
It is I who crush the flower 
And I am the thing men see 
Who search for the thing I hide. 



74 



MIDNIGHT: BATTERY PARK 

Neither a late moon nor the evening star 
Lights the dark moving of the waters here; 
Out of the silence the shrill turn of a car 
And the lapping of waves under the pier. 

The light of the street lamp cares not for the towers 
Whose darkened windows rise into the dark, 
Only for the late paths and the border flowers 
Stirred by the harbor winds in the shadowy Park. 

I have sought silences that are not my own 
And I have almost found them here in the night 
Where I may close my eyes and dare be alone 
With what a man knows of music and of light. 



75 



OCTOBER 

Alexander Wilson, died Sept. 1919 

How can I hold my purposes when the trees 

Let fall their verdure and unbeauti fully 

Pierce the October gravity of sky? 

I feel an inward loss, looking at these. 

And a friend of mine is dead whose ways I thought 

Were something like the many leaves that make 

Marvels of life from sun and rain they take — 

Dead! And I shall not know him as I ought! 

How can I hold my purposes when men die 

Like scattering skeletons of withered green 

In windy comers of the earth and lie 

Too early quiet for far too long? I have seen 

Truth in the trees and in the faces of men 

But sometimes I think I shall never see it again. 



76 



WALT WHITMAN 
1819-1919 

His shining presence falls, 
Come noon or midnight, 
On meadows, in hallways. 
Build no memorials, 
There shall be sunlight 
And life-blood always. 

What his breath held is blown 
From breasts of singers 
And songless creatures. 
Carve no didactic stone. 
The cutter's fingers 
Are his true features. 



77 



TO A SKYLARK 

OR ANY OTHER BIRD 

At dawn from flower-fondled sleep you rise 
By spirals, so they say, and in the skies 
Exult and ride and from your throat let go 
Sweet singing falls of ravishment which blow 
Among earth's thunders and enwrapping airs 
And pierce the little flesh which a man wears. 
Ah, comfortable bird I If this is so 
Study the sounds and syllables which flow 
From all men's lips and, when you rise again 
To-morrow or next year, sing back at men 
In their own language. Say there is no merit 
In using wings one cannot but inherit. 
And ask what members man can use as well 
And why he thinks that heaven and not hell 
Is reached by envied flight, and why he sighs 
At you on hungry business in the skies 
And not at his own kind at his own door 
Likewise employed and likewise hunted for 
And likewise troubled much by storm and change. 
Say that for man to envy birds is strange! 
Rise up and sing and say things wiser still 
But oh! fly high, for man is out to kill. 

78 



THE DISSEMBLING LOOK 

Is it so precious, 
Is it so dear 
That you must hide it 
When I come near? 

You know that I know 
That under your furs 
There's a warm body, 
A bloom that stirs. 

Why give me marble 
When I want blood? 
Why give me parched sand 
When you've a flood? 

May be you love to feel, 
When I have passed, 
Life blushing back again, 
Safety at last. 



79 



ADVICE 

When you go down town 
Turn and go back. 
Only ahead of you 
Is the sky black. 

When you are back again 
Turn and go down. 
There is a darkness 
At both ends of town. 

When at the noon hour 
You hurry somewhere 
Take someone with you 
Or the dark will be there. 

When you are safe in bed, 
Clock striking two, 
Think, is there anything 
Darker than you? 

Then when you wake 

Look for light in the Park 

Or else keep so busy 

You don't mind the dark, 
80 



DIFFERENT STREETS 

There was a little boy 

Solemn as stone, 

Who walked through my street 

Always alone. 

Once I came home 

By a different way 

At a different hour 

Of a different day. 

There was the little boy 

Jubilant then, 

Building wet snow 

Into marvelous men. 

Life is not always 

Just what it seems. 

Little old boys 

Have happy young dreams. 



81 



TO THE URBANE 

Who cannot drink the wild winds 
Must set dry lips to little pools. 
Who cannot feed upon sun-fire 
Must wait until the sun cools. 

So raise your towering city walls 
You miserable all! 
Build strong roofs above yoiu* heads 
To catch the stars that fall. 

Stop your ears against the wind 
Ward the great light from your eyes 
Clothe the naked earth with cobbles 
Tell old horses you are wise! 



82 



EARLY FLOWERS 



Mayflowers once and violets now 
On sunny corners of the town; 
April warmth upon a brow 
Where the Winter winds have blown. 

Tulip now, and daffodil 
By the window in a bowl. 
April! Spare one breath to fill 
A Winter-shaken soul. 



aa 



ILLUSION 

Silver earth in a grove of slanting stars 

Blooming and waving in heaven. 

Moonlight over lonely wavering water, 

Marriage of silver and pearl. 

Have I lost life that this is beautiful 

Beyond the memory of all living things . . . 

The sullying squalor of breathing men and women, 

The clamor of their ineffectual ways, 

Life and the need of living, hunger and death? 

Black against a dark sky lightened 

The writhe of bending pines in the hands of the night. 

The moon has sent chimseras to their caves. 

Look! What is it that walks the singing Sound? 

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beats my heart 

So high that I have forgotten the bitterness 

Of searching a long street for it in vain 

At noon of a rainy day. 



84 



THE END OF MARCH 

This is a sea of Southern sun 
That in the fingers of the wind 
Sweeps over us. The storms are done. 
The Winter drifts are black and thinned. 
Even the streets start violets, 
Even the harried heart forgets 
What Winter was, what living is. 

Now, like the seedlings of last year. 
Green little shoots of mortal souls 
Reach for the soil. The sun shines clear. 
Hyacinth roots grope down in bowls 
As men grope at the days which pass. 
The white roots thicken in their glass. 
They have their limits, man has his. 



85 



PARADOX 

Roots of the green tree sucking at the dry- 
Earth's crust are safe, wings wavering in wind 
Are sure, for who has ever seen them die. 

Though there be pith-gorged beetles in the bole 
Though there be hunters crouching in a blind, 
Leaf and wing serve tree-sense and bird soul. 

Who then are these and am I one of them 

Of whom men say, "When person pride is dead 

You may be granted the adorning gem; 

"When love is stilled you shall have the loveliest, 
"Pull up your roots and you shall then be fed, 
"Care nothing and ask nothing and die blessed.'* 



86 



THE AMPLE CLOAK 



I am forever treading on and tearing 
The warmest garment which I wear, a thing , 
As like the shape men keep inheriting 
As fruit is like a tree when it is bearing. 
Most of the alleys which I walk these days 
Are narrower than my flesh and this together, 
And mostly, when I venture out, the weather 
Arranges torment for it a hundred ways. 
Perhaps I may not keep it about me always 
Although I am nothing but what it makes of me; 
Perhaps I should leave it hanging in one of those hall- 
ways 
Frequented by whomever I need not be. 
Perhaps there is a crack there or a hook 
To catch and keep a piece. I shall go and look. 



87 



QUATORZAINE 

By the early light of our precarious lives 

The rugged world seems colder than it is. 

What do we see? This certainty and this, 

Truths made of untruths which the truth forgives, 

Figures of clay, imaginary shapes, 

As real as stars, as shadowy as smoke, 

Fears which unfounded knowledges evoke, 

Joys and delights, we foxes and they grapes. 

We foxes — hungry as in ^sop's fable, 

That scamper off to a pretended world 

Where no one knows that stones might well be hurled 

At hanging fruit, where all are charitable 

And flatter clever beasts for calling sour 

The clustered vines that climb the ivory tower. 



88 



PASSERS-BY 



Mostly it is eyes that find me 
And your eyes are gone. 
Shoestrings I have little need of 
For these shoes that bear me on. 
So I let you fall behind 
With other things 
To which I am blind. 



n 



And you, my little friend of the gay dress! 
In a swift moment of encountered eyes 
I have touched your hand and kissed your wistfulness 
And looked with you upon eternities, 
And I know that neither the powder on your nose 
Nor the amazing things you wear upon your feet 
Can alter the gentleness my vision knows. 
Seeing you hurry past me down the street. 

89 



90 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 



m 



I know you. You are one of those who fear 
The certain end of their uncertainties. 
Who, never having had possession here, 
Still seek it in such transient things as these 
Bright windows looking into gaudy places 
Where there are wine-lists and long bills of fare 
Arranged for girls who wear their shoulders bare 
And kindle eyes with passion from their faces. 



IV 



In the concert hall 

You are the musician 

I the listener. 

Here your fingers touch no bow, 

Make no music for me. 

We pass one another 

In a kind of silence 

As if we were dead. 



I do not marvel so that you can wear 
A flower in your tailored buttonhole 
As that the flower does not perish there 
In the Winter of your soul. 



PASSERS-BY 91 



VI 



When you have passed and other eyes 
Have found me with a new surprise, 
I know I shall not call to mind 
The colored hat you wore, the kind 
Of dress nor anything so sure. 
Only your laughter will endure 
And come to me on other trips 
Down other streets from other lips. 



LONGSHOREMAN 

Longshoreman by a sea of sun, 

Much wearied by too many bales, 

A man moves. What of stone-chilled gales? 

And what of old tasks never done? 

Too low the rafters of the pier, 
Too high the piles of casks and cases, 
Too little light in fellow faces, 
Too loud the noise of living here. 

Are there warmer winds than these 
That stir dark storms of stinging dust? 
Are there waters of earth's crust 
That reach sun-drenched Hesperides? 

Longshoreman with a life for hire, 
Bewildered by these days of his, 
A man moves, and his moving is 
A dark wind scattering smothered fire. 



92 



SOLILOQUY 

The winged seeds of early flowers go 

Dancing on the wings of the ground wind, 

Cutting their passage with unstable haste 

In frantic spirals through this slow, sad brain. 

I who have watched the passages of men 

Watch these and time the watching to a twist 

Of idle fingers among idle grasses 

Making a motion as little understood. 

The high and certain drift of afternoon 

Toward an evening that comes creeping up the hills 

Is busy altering the universe. 

Busy with clouds whose lovely shapes must die. 

I sit upon this stone almost securely 

And, seeing the seeds blow down and fall to earth 

In the relaxing hold of the faint air 

And the crowned trees rise up and stand unstirred 

And the mountains draw their shadows about their 

shoulders 
And the birds stop to sing on branches near me, 
Feel conquered somehow by a sense of joy 
That takes me at the heart and at the eyes. 
Ah! Why so beautiful? Is man a jewel 

93 



94 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

That he is set with sapphires of delight 

And rubies of impassioned vividness 

In the righ metal of earth's atmosphere? 

A jewel? The wounds of forests on the hills 

Cry out against him and the wildflowers break 

Never to rise from deep man-trodden hollows, 

And the birds, such of them as still have life. 

Go crying weirdly, sadly, overhead. 

Then why so beautiful, great Mansion Earth, 

For man, mad-minded enemy of all? 

Is it that to his devastating eyes 

The bright pain of your beauty, summoning tears, 

Summons a gifted vision not too dull 

To see the heart of his eternal strangeness, 

The animate power of that tidal sea 

Which washes over him and is the world? 



SURRENDER 

Is nothing changed? Nothing in all the town? 
Is this the same street where my shadow swam? 
Are these same clothes still saying what I am? 
Is this the same sun settling thinly down? 

Is the same door still subject to this key, 
The carpet to these heels, the chairs still shoddy, 
The bed still printed by my weary body. 
The ceiling still the same height over me? 

All, all the same. Hence my bewilderment. 
Listen. When I went out just after nine 
The world was dark, and all the dark was mine. 
Beauty was dead, all beauty's savings spent. 

Then all the world seemed muffled with deep ashes 

And every step seemed walking up a flow 

Of lava poured across all ways to go 

And heaven seemed a mountain crowned with flashes. 

That is exactly as things seemed just after 

The door closed on my going. By what magic. 

If things were so, is life no longer tragic? 

Why are my .veins blown through by winds of laughter? 

95 



96 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Has a man no way to defend himself 

When the peace which comes with dignified despair 

Seems ruffled and attacked from everywhere 

Like a high hat snow-balled by some Christmas elf? 

Not I. Let sun drive dusk from doors and hallways. 
Let the brain leap. Swear dancing is its calling. 
I yield. But leave me a little time for falling 
Down on my knees to pray that it be for always. 



SHIRKING 

I should have gone to the grocer's shop, 
Down the alley and turn to the right, 
To buy a lady some corn to pop 
Over the coals to-night. 

But I have been to Symphony Hall, 
Up the alley and then in the cars. 
And I am not what I was at all — 
I know of nothing below the stars. 

Marvelous moons are where lights should be, 
Down the alley and home again, 
Moons which sing as they gleam at me 
From between the feet of the rain. 

Suppose I had gone to the grocery store. 
Dug in my pockets for coins to spend, 
What would have come to the glamor I wore 
In the end? 



97 



BRETONNE 



Break in upon the boisterous play of children 

Sculling their clumsy boats by the breakwater 

And ask them why she stands there looking outward. 

All they will say is that she is someone's daughter. 

The sunlight falls upon a tide so still 

That corded masts against a cloudless heaven 

Seem not to move nor creak nor rattle even 

And there is no whispering from the pines on the hill. 

Yet at the last stone of the crumbling wall 

She stands as if the last of storms were blowing 

And life were out in it and there were no knowing 

Whether any colored sails would blow back at all. 

Ask of the chattering women on their knees 

Beside the dirty wash-pool why she is waiting 

And they will laugh a laugh which speaks of hating 

And point to their heads to show you what she sees. 

Visions, perhaps, that fill all things with fire 

And little ventures with enormous fears 

And make a young girl old before her years 

With the fierce burden of being what visions require. 

Visions, perhaps, yet when the tide returns 

Lifting the kelp on the rocks as wind lifts hair, 

98 



BRETONNE 99 

Someone who sailed will come and seek her there 

And find the thing she is but not what burns 

Within her as she meets the villagers 

With the puzzled blankness of her strange wild face, 

Half certain there can be no proper place 

In the world of bodies for a trouble like hers. 



CIRCE 

What slender Circe frightened by his steel 

Gave up her magic and with crafty care 

Forwarned him of this music on the air 

And made him fear what these can make him feel? 

Who was she, the mysterious Sorceress, 

So jealous of shore sirens and their song 

That she could urge him to make surely strong 

With hempen twists his human willingness? 

Too late he curses her, too late he sees 

The terrible sweet joy those sirens tend 

With blossomed breasts, moist mouths, a balmy bend 

Of sea-foam throats, a flash of vivid knees. 

Their white arms madden him, their voices drift 

Across the winds with laughter from their eyes. 

Lashed to his mast, he bums in heart and thighs. 

Ropes bite his flesh, choke veins grown wildly swift. 

Strange Circe said, "Beware those asking fire." 

Ulysses, lingering with her, drank her words 

And changed, not to a beast to swell her herds, 

But to a man afraid of man's desire. 



100 



CALYPSO 



Serenely and like gentle touch of hands 
The sunny wind stirs in a sad man's hair. 
Lulled by the slip of ripples on far sands 
He lies at peace. None of the world is there. 
White Helen is a wisp of vanished cloud 
Over deep memory ; Troy's walls, the many dead 
Are gone, half hidden in a grievous shroud 
Woven of sea-sounds and winds overhead. 
Remembered Ithaca, half fair, half feared, 
Beyond a faint horizon rising, falling. 
Floats calmly, waiting, and dim things endeared 
By aged distance breathe no word of calling. 



n 

Into the sleeper's dream the living sea 

Shaped like a joyful woman whitely warm 

Moves with rich silence and rare mystery 

With lips to take his broken heart by storm. 

With hands that reach up round him to draw down 

Into their passionate oblivion 

101 



102 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

The hurt soul, beaten by winds wrongly blown, 
From which all help of heaven has passed on. 
Her breath is on his lids, her body swims 
Into his aching weariness. Ulysses 
Flings up an arm to eyes the sea-mist dims. 
Above the wind the white surf booms and hisses. 



Ill 

The sleeper wakens and the vision fades 

And the world, done with its eclipse, grows clear. 

The dream shape seems a sea of suns and shades 

And Ithaca, an island hidden in fear. 

Comes through a silver pain into his soul 

And that immutable Penelope 

For whom a man must keep his spirit whole, 

Shines with inexorable tranquillity 

Down on despair that hangs a humble head 

Between her and a shamed swift wish to be 

Safe for all time in the oblivious bed 

Of Calypso, amorous woman of the sea. 



THE WINDMILL 

By the sea the winds must blow 
For the sea can never know 
When a landsman miller dies. 
So the winds blow down the skies, 
Blow the silver mist from eyes 
And the sails of windmills go. 
Giant sails at sea are whirled 
Round the windmill of the world. 



103 



WIDOW'S WEEDS 

Black clings about your beautiful unsleeved 
Young body as windy rain about the stalk 
Of a lithe poplar, slender and small-leaved. 
Light as the talk of poplar stems your talk. 
Beautiful! Of what are you bereaved 
That grief weds with your shadow as you walk? 

Why such a splendid lustre in your eyes 

As not to any stranger seems like tears 

For any part of man that ever dies? 

Your ornaments of sorrow yield to the years 

Which keep you fresh. Your body's poise belies 

The sombre want of color which it wears. 

From foot to face, like wind that sets astir 
Breasts of bound water, the breath of living runs — 
So moves the flame beneath the tigress' fur, 
Howling against the night's diminished suns 
From lonely thickets for one gone from her, 
One whose hot loins are a cold skeleton's. 



104 



NEW SINGING 



FOR G. A. 



When the far sun falls to my window-sill 
And sparrows in the gutters chirp and chatter 
And the earthy winds of morning come to scatter 
The night's commandments to be sad and still, 
Sweet sense of you comes to me like a fire 
Searing and burning vein and vision clear 
And you are not a goddess, and I hear 
Wild voices singing, singing of desire. 



n 



Then trooping happiness with many flames 
Comes dancing from the fringes of the sky 
Attending what my body knows you by. 
I rise and fling out arms and call your names. 
The winds of morning whistle at the sill 
And the world's beating rises from the stones, 
But troops with torches kindle in my bones 
Wild fires of you. All other things seem still. 

105 



106 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

in 

Beloved, how shall I be glad of you 
Who have brought music to my silences 
And beauty to my grass, leaves to my trees, 
And with your vivid fingers now undo 
The beaten darkness of those bat-like wings 
Which for so long in my cathedral mind 
Stifled what holy passions I could find 
For keener light than sun or planet brings. 

IV 

With what rich gifts of what adoring state 
Can I heap up the altar I have built? 
Jewels will lose their lustre, flowers wilt, 
Songs blow away and promises lose weight. 
Should I bring pagan bullocks, garlanded, 
To bellow in the porch for sacrifice? 
Should I bring incense, burning, metals of price 
And a shimmer of colored fabrics to outspread? 

V 

You are remembrance of some happy face, 
Dear memory of once honored mystery 
Flashed back to bitter earth to bloom and be 
A joy, a living miracle taking place; 
And I, a man whom beauty blinds with aching 
And the pathos of desire makes desperate, 
Find in that joy a new twice-blessed state, 
A new life, a young heaven in the making. 



PRESENCE 



Even though the city of streets and darkened hallways 

Sweeps now about me where your wonders were, 

And you are no longer here to minister 

To hands of mine, and lips, that want you always; 

Though there are strangers where we were together 

And they are strange because I have lost your eyes. 

Though little puddles scattered by feet disguise 

Old ways we walked once in a better weather; 

Yet this wet wind is breath that quickened you 

Before you vanished and left me here alone: 

These faces that pass me are memories which renew 

What you once were in the dark city of stone; 

What you once were! And that is what God is, even, 

To hearts like ours that take the World for Heaven. 



107 



DANCE 

Against the valley which is full of moon 
I see you move, feet on the clustered clover 
Like rain-drops upon water. The sweet croon 
Of serving instruments is faint, the clouds go over 
In image of your hair. Your hands are torches 
Carried for something that has many altars, 
Your lifted eyes are temples in whose porches 
The light of humbled planets kneels and falters. 
A watching fire which burns like dawn in me 
Leaps out and after you as breath to prayer, 
Trembles beside you, touches your mystery 
And flames triumphant in the dusky air. 
Over the earth like light on bodiless breeze 
I see you blow, I see your swift feet flash; 
My senses shudder and fail and freed of these 
And of the body which joy bums to ash 
I enter you, sway fall and rise above 
The limits of this creature that forgets. 
Failing the touch of you, the look of love 
And spends love's peace to improvise regrets. 
Leap up, you Wonder, to the music of joy, 

Move to the measures of the passionate moon, 

108 



DANCE 109 

Dance the proud chorus no man can destroy 

For joy is life and limbs will stiffen soon 

And I who am too brief to understand 

Will soon be blind and wear a heavy hand. 

And moon and clover and the magic wind 

Will fade and all life's golden blood be thinned 

Against the valley which is full of shadow 

I see you move. You who are living light 

And lovelier life than ever bloomed in the meadow 

Leap up with laughter! Shatter the great night I 



REACH OUT 

Reach out your hands and gather the light which falls 

Into the room where you are sure to be; 

Touch with your fingers those unshadowed walls 

And let their presence fill you happily. 

Not that these things are melodies and joys 

But that, being near you, they have stored away 

Some little of the beauty life employs 

To bear you through disproof of things I say. 

Lift up your arms to the wind that blows the curtain 

And know that I, with forehead to the floor, 

Am at your feet, so beautiful and certain, 

With reverence and a happy fear and more 

In want of just such flashing of sweet fire 

As your hands on my shoulders might inspire. 



110 



YOU AND I 

Were you a tree I know how you would rise 
From earth made green with lying at your feet 
Against fresh wind and sun made strong and sweet 
By touch and gleam of leaves which you made wise. 

Were you a bird you would be just the one 
To startle silence in some strange wild way 
By flight more rosily swift than rising day 
And colors never prismed in any sun. 

Were you a river you would not be calm 
But rather with rich laughter flash and stream 
Through valleys where no man should come to dream 
So much as drink you thirstily from his palm. 

Though you are all of these, yet to the tree 
I have been only wind; to the winged thing 
A watcher only, and to the wandering 
Of strong bright water a dreamer who could see 
Only an image of his reasoned pride 
Wrapped close about the fire it hoped to hide. 



Ill 



EPITHALAMIUM 

Across the sky a flight of burning dust. 

The air grips at me as I stand 

Held to the wild earth's whirling crust 

By power that works through foot and lifted hand. 

Swiftly the shoulders of the hills lift against the stars, 

Swiftly they rise and cross the moon's face. 

I hold tightly to the pasture bars 

And plant my feet upon this grassy place 

And close my eyes to close the sense that mars 

My motion through the circle of the sky, 

Through wind and fire which I am governed by. 

Over my head the night stands like a sea 

And the stars rock and dip among the waves. 

Like water the flood of life sweeps over me 

From wing that stirs and grass that paves. 

Even the peaks that pierce heaven with their flying 

Shudder with strength and splendor in their places. 

Nothing is dead. Nothing is even dying. 

Life leaps like fire from all things, all faces. 

So in the night I stand, my body bearing 

Fiercely and blindly in its inmost vein 

The secret power of the last star's staring, 

112 



EPITHALAMIUM 113 

The passion of the moon for fields of grain, 

The anguish of all hunger and all pain; 

The blessed burden which gives life to life, 

The beauty which a man takes shape to hold, 

The breath which blows through bodies like a knife, 

The seed a man is moisture to unfold. 

And all these things, as all the studded skies 

Spread moon and star, I pour from out my heart 

Because of hands that have torn wide apart 

Great stony dykes once raised against surprise 

Which kept my soul from navigable waves. 

Racing cold corridors as dark as graves. 

Oh, radiant Wonder! Oh, touched Being! I turn 

Not from this window opening out of me 

In fear, but with unlidded eyes that burn 

In image of imagined destiny. 

I reach in darkness for your holy hands 

To touch and so feel something taking form 

Here where this mortal measure of me stands, 

A joy to blow me wise with splendid storm. 

If there is any aim or end to this 

Great outward surging of stirred blood and bone 

In such a nearness of your spirit there is 

More perfect sense than men have ever known 

Of where it lies and how a man may go 

Forever in its way. This then you are. 

How shall I say — be glad — ^to you who know 

More fierce strong things of beauty than any star 

Knows of the .upper air? How shall I speak 



114 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

When speech is only a kissing of the hems 

Of that toward which the dawns of your eyes break, 

Toward which you rise as flowers rise on stems? 

Oh, Beautiful! I am no longer young. 

Now from the gentle breast of your wise being 

I lift my head and open eyes for seeing. 

I clamber down from that to which I clung. 

I take on stature and with stature grow 

Humble that I have fed upon you so. 

Across the sky a flight of burning dust. 

The air grips at me as I stand 

Held to the wild earth's whirling crust 

By power that works through foot and lifted hand. 

Oh, lift your face and give my lips your mouth! 

The wind of Summer sings from the starred South. 

Forgive me what I was when winds were West. 

Straining the blossomed throbbing of your breast 

Against my leaping heart I feel the give 

Of wild earth riding onward, fiercely whirled, 

I see the vivid sun, I see the world 

Beyond men's brains where love may learn to live. 



STORM 

Over the mountain now 
The cold clouds ride like a sea. 
Come with your lips and your brow 
And your breast and be close to me. 

It is black where the mountain stands 
And the valley streams are foam. 
Come to me now with your hands 
And let my heart go home. 

There is only one way to meet storm — 
With a flame of towering fire 
Rising from hearts that are warm 
With wise desire. 

Take my lips to your brow 
And let me look in your eyes, 
For over the mountain now 
Wild storm winds fling the skies. 



115 



NOCTURNE 

When you have let the late sun burn you bare 

And have given yourself to the wind 

Come look for me and I shall rise and tear 

The darkness from old spruce-woods still unthinned 

And you shall have it to bind round your hair. 

When you have lain at night among dark trees 
Filling the heaven of your eyes with stars 
And your white body with the singing breeze, 
Come where I am and I shall bend the bars 
Of moonlight to whatever shape you please. 

When you have bathed bright breast and shining shoulder 
Deep in the darkness of some mountain pool, 
Body to body take me and let smolder 
The deep fires. Far away old suns grow cool. 
Look! Here are embers that will not grow colder! 



116 



WORDS 

Not all the help men ever have of dreams 

Could make of life what life beside you is. 

Not all the singing of all vocal streams 

Could make of sound what with some strong-mouthed kiss 

I stop upon the laughter of your lips. 

Not all the motion and fire of stars and suns 

Could move the skies as in my finger-tips, 

Touching your breast, the life is moved and runs. 

Not all the angels of eventual heaven 

Could do with darkness what your eyes can do. 

So I choose not to die at twenty-seven, — 

Perhaps at thirty or at thirty-two. 



117 



THE DURHAMS 



There is Niagara, which is water tumbling 

From cliffs which keep it thundering and rumbling, 

But that is nothing to the fall of storm 

From heights of cold to meadows moist and warm 

In Autiman over Windbrook. In November 

When a turkey's life is down to its last ember 

A little wind with only leaves to drift 

Creeps from the West to Southward through a shift 

Made to seem very like a lull, and then 

Blows up the valley toward the peak again. 

Then tides of mist come sweeping from the sea 

And climb the ridge and linger dizzily 

And plunge like sublimated water down 

Gray gulleys which converge upon the town. 

Where is Niagara in the face of this? 

Diminished and outdone, and all the hiss 

Of all its seethe of spray is but a quiet 

Beside this fall of storm-cloud and this riot 

Of frantic pines and birches bent like bows 

Drawn to ward off the onslaught of their foes. 

118 



THE DUKHAMS 119 

Just such an Autumn storm was in full course 

When Abel Durham with his old lame horse 

Drove up into his dooryard and descended, 

And young Job, through the window, saw what ended 

The long, hard time of two men badly keeping 

A house whose only woman was one sleeping 

Under the sandy pines beyond the road, 

A woman freed of her enslaving load. 

Here was another woman to keep going 

The heavy house of man, and winds were blowing 

Wildly and fiercely so she might not say 

Ever at any time of night or day 

That her coming was unwarned, though Durham smiled 

In partial refutation of the wild 

And unequivocal welcome of the storm. 

The old man brought her in to get her warm 

And grinned at Job, who thought them man and wife 

And called up the best features of a life 

Devoid of women. Durham spoke her names. 

Not any of which were Durham. Two small flames 

Lent by the lantern to her eyes, saw Job. 

He shook her hand and took the carriage robe, 

Frightened by what he saw that spoke to him 

There in her face, so very far from dim. 

He was puzzled by the strangeness of those eyes 

Flung backwards over a round shoulder lifted. 

He stayed about the kitchen, killing flies. 

Watching for stove-lids waiting to be shifted. 

And when he .went to bed he saw himself 



120 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Set in some crazy figure like an elf 
Following a woman through place after place, 
A woman with strange meaning in her face. 
And then he woke and heard a woman move 
Down in the kitchen lighting up the stove, 
And it was morning and the sun was bright 
And life had altered, worm-like, in the night. 



II 

A mild man with a gentle silver beard 

And eyes of a blue no baby ever feared 

And large black clothes and little quiet feet 

Walked in his room and rubbed his hands for heat 

And, feeling his conscience go a little lame, 

Wondered what he would say when Durham came. 

He stopped beside his table and lit the lamp 

Then turned his head to listen to a tramp 

Of muddy shoes upon the snow outside. 

The sound spread like a ripple and grew wide. 

The mild man shook with insecure relief 

Borrowed from respite, and turned over a leaf 

In a large lamp-lit book upon the table 

And stooped to fortify the charitable 

Intention of his mission with the word 

Of one much read but very seldom heard. 

His straight sweet lips moved faintly. His eyes closed. 

His hands closed. His head swayed as if he dozed 

While the lamplight fell upon his fine, smooth hair 



THE DURHAMS 121 

And on his face, and made it seem nowhere 

In any plane at all, too frankly near 

For any heaven and too faint for here. 

His lips moved silently and then he rose 

And crept to the curtained window on tip-toes 

As if the God he prayed to might discern 

His human, uncontrollable concern. 

He stood a moment peering into the dark 

Following every far-off little spark, 

Which might be wagon-lights, until it grew 

And clattered loudly past as wagons do. 

Once when one heavy bulk without a lamp 

Came almost quietly and stood breathing damp 

Before his gate, the pastor's heart beat higher 

And chokingly and filled his face with fire. 

His hands with dampness and his feet with cold 

And his mind with unhappy sense of being old. 

He saw old Durham sitting starkly still 

As if awaiting some decree of will 

To move him, saw him drop the reins and rise 

And wrap his blanket tighter about his thighs 

And then sit back again and speak to his team 

And move ahead as if he wouldn't dream 

Of stopping there, much less of going in 

To be addressed in terms of God and sin. 

The pastor wandered back into his chair 

And threw his head back and sat panting there. 

And then he rose again and paced the floor. 

And at the window and the loose-hung door 



122 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

The wind went shuddering, as if to say- 
That nothing is to-morrow nor to-day- 
Just as it seems to men who think their brains 
Have seen and follow laws which God ordains 
Without consulting life, the citizen 
Of winds and places, animals and men. 
The grave man lighted still another lamp 
And then resumed his lightfoot, troubled, tramp 
And thought that he would try the woman next 
And so be more inspired and less perplexed 
And lose all feeling that the Winter wind 
Is nearer than the Lord to a man's mind. 



in 

A woman at a window watched a man 

Load up his sleigh with bags and an oil can 

And climb aboard and gee the horses off 

And fog the air a little with his cough. 

She watched him to the highway, where the team 

Broke to a jingling trot. She watched the stream 

Hurrying under the bridge, so swift and certain. 

And then she shuddered and drew the window curtain 

And stood a moment pressing at her cheeks 

With anguished fingers which left livid streaks. 

She saw the mirror and was reflected there, 

And watched as she pulled hair-pins from her hair 

Letting it fall a little about one shoulder, 

All black, no gray to prove her growing older — 



THE DURHAMS 123 

All black and soft, far softer than the face 

To which it helped a little to give grace. 

The curtain at the window flapped in the draft 

And the late Winter sun wedged in a shaft 

Of thin-blown gold that reached as far as the wall 

And kindled the printed roses, thorns and all. 

The woman stood and listened to a stir 

Of heavy moving in the room next to her. 

The floor-boards creaked a little and the wall 

Shivered and made small grains of plaster fall. 

The woman listened and stepped nearer the door 

Loosening a button in the waist she wore. 

She spoke in a voice which had faint shudders in it 

Asking for Job to come to her a minute. 

And then she sat and stared across the bed 

And pressed a hand palm-outward to her head. 

She said "Come in" when there was a light knocking 

Then moved her noisy chair back and sat rocking. 

Job entered timidly, with averted eyes. 

His hands were large and thick, his feet of a size. 

His voice was knife-edged but it soon was warm 

With other lips among the black, soft storm 

Of loosened hair. The old walls kept their creaking 

And there was other language than lip-speaking, 

Youth crying out to youth and fear to fear 

That rich, red veins beat far too high to hear — 

The strange wild anguish of unblossomed lives 

Seeking a safety in what the moment gives 

When beauty. traces beauty among limbs 



124 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

No voice of reason waras nor even dims. 

The world was on the other side of walls — 

The world of sleigh-bells and of crisp foot- falls, 

But strange volcanoes of half-planned mischance 

Sometimes burst wide and do a fiery dance 

In the impassioned spheres beyond earth's law. 

Neither the woman nor her lover saw 

Durham creep up and listen at the door, 

And neither heard the creaking of the floor. 

For they lay still and listened to their hearts, 

For they were children, and no child's ear starts 

At such small things as sounds. So Durham waited 

And the thumping in his breast was unabated. 

And then he heard them stir and felt like falling 

And a great darkness rose and stood there walling 

Life and the living from his furtive brain 

And all of him seemed breaking under the strain. 

Back down the stairs he groped his way and through 

The dizzy kitchen, slamming the door to. 

And then those happy bodies above stairs 

Leaped to their feet aware of life that wears 

A cowering defeated look and goes 

Stooped and distorted as the least wind blows. 

IV 

Far up the slope of birch and brooding fir 
Where winds in green strings make aeolian stir 
Of rippled singing, little feet and wings 



THE DURHAMS 125 

Carry the lives they tend and thunderings 

Of water falling from far rocky walls 

Fade among mosses and the sunlight falls 

In softer silence. The shrill cry of jays 

Shrieks in the clearings and the mole obeys 

His wish to hide, and world-old gravities 

Are disobeyed by this year's chicadees. 

There to the windward of a coppice lies 

With lowered head and deep, inquiring eyes 

A slim white thing made as if out of breeze 

That carries snow, of little sapling trees 

Rich with some April, delicate and rare, 

Too beautiful to sleep, for unaware 

Of things less beautiful that stalk their prey 

Beauty is never safe. By night nor day 

There is no rest for loveliness, no repose. 

Always a deer, with wakeful ears and nose. 

Must listen and breathe, more surely when a doe 

From throat to haunches is as white as snow. 

There by a coppice of dark evergreen 

The Windbrook doe lies down, unheard, unseen. 

Like a grouse booming goes her restless heart 

And her strained flanks keep twitching, ready to start 

Up and away at scent or sound of fear. 

At sun that alters shadows, winds that veer 

And carry safety with them. Always so. 

There is no peace but says, "Rise up and go!" 

The forest in its dusk is full of snares. 

Even the best tuned sense comes unawares 



126 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Sometimes upon inevitable end — 
A hunter's bullet or a lynx to mend 
The broken life and bind it up with death 
And suck the crimson fire and stop the breath 
That quickened beauty and inspired the wood 
With sudden ecstasy. Such is the food 
Which gives the busy fittest their survival — 
Beauty, of which there may be no revival 
Once the wild seed is cleft and the kernel gone. 
The white doe shudders and leaps and hurries on. 



The wind among roof icicles was weird 
Although the sap was in the maple roots. 
Old Durham, with some ice in heart and beard, 
Stood in the doorway brushing off his boots. 
He shut the door and slapped it with his cap 
And lurched across the kitchen to the tap 
Where water trickled over pans and dishes 
And shells of eggs and remnants of tinned fishes. 
The stove was cold. There was not even sun 
To slip in through the panes and kindle it. 
With such a fire as shines for everyone 
But him who learns that life is a misfit. 
Old Durham burned his fingers on a match 
And tore his coat-sleeve on the woodshed latch 
And stumbled in the kindling. These were spears 
Of that world-militant which a man fears 



THE DURHAMS 127 

Who fears himself and finds that mad self lodged 

In all things neighboring and familiar 

In all the shifts by which he ever dodged 

The fall of facts, the rise of things that are. 

The stove was not unyielding. It grew warm 

And Durham rubbed his hands and held them near it 

And looked through frost-etched windows at the storm 

And heard the wind and wished he couldn't hear it. 

He found some rags and stuffed them at the sills 

But there are crevices which nothing fills 

In men and houses and the storm still shrieked 

In lath and brain and both those frail things creaked. 

The gaunt man sat awhile and sucked and blew 

Breath which had all that any air could do 

To feed him what his old thin blood required. 

His beard kept thawing and his boots perspired, 

And there were demons prodding at his ease 

With sharp innumerable miseries. 

He searched in corners for more window-cloths 

And found some in a closet full of moths 

And under them a woman's pair of shoes 

Down at the heel and broken at the toes. 

He dropped the rags and let the shoes fall, too, 

And stood and stared at them as if they told 

Some old forgotten thing and were a clue 

To dishes and cold stove and the storm's cold. 

He looked at them and then he raised his boot 

And kicked them as he might have kicked a root 

That tripped him on his going to the spring. 



128 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

He kicked them both and saw them fly and bring 

Hard up against the glaze of window-frost. 

They crashed and went, but tongues of blizzard crossed 

The silver threshold of the shattered panes 

And stung the stove with little stings of steam 

And Durham stared, as children stare at trains, 

And gaped as if it might have been a dream. 

He swore at what he thought was hounding him 

And stuffed the holes with rags. The room grew dim. 

He shifted pots in fury and kept looking 

To see if things were done that sat there cooking. 

He drank his coffee warm, like milk from a cow. 

And ate cold beans and felt the cold wind blow. 



VI 

The old man stamped about his sugar-camp 

Counting the buckets and the spigot pegs, 

Wondering how ever any man could tramp 

To all those trees with but one pair of legs. 

And now and then he stopped and his breath came 

Thick, like a horse's, and he had to lean 

Against the brick-work of the kettle frame 

To come up out of the fog in which he had been. 

He had his gun beside him, thinking of bear, 

And once he stumbled on it and it fell 

And made him dizzy to see it lying there. 

If it went off his ears had failed to tell. 

For they were thumping, thumping, with a heart 



THE DURHAMS 129 

So startled that there seemed no more to start. 
He stooped and raised the gun, and straightening, 
Saw through the door a stir of something moving 
Far up among the maple boles. No wing. 
Perhaps a bear, but waiting would be proving. 
He stood and watched and seemed to see a blur 
Of round converging wheels that came and went. 
He wiped his eyes and still there was a stir 
Beyond the trees. A branch swung down and bent. 
A windfall crashed. A bird far out of reach 
Sang in the barren branches of a beech. 
The old man watched and neither saw nor heard 
Things which were yet half visible in his brain — 
A woman, all in white, a little blurred — 
A man whose presence irkcl him and gave pain; 
And out beyond these things a naked grove 
Of old untimely trees and drifts of snow 
And a faint sense of something waiting to move 
And a void lull of winds about to blow. 
He took a breath again and rubbed his eyes. 
There. He saw it now. No bear moves so, 
For it was tinged with white, and white implies 
Some lighter thing, perhaps the rare white doe. 
The old man trembled and swung up his gun. 
It shook, but the sights shone clearly in the sun 
And then he seemed to lose the sighted thing. 
There was a swift spasmodic stiffening 
Of finger on the trigger and a roar 
And whatever it had been was there no more. 



130 GRANITE AND ALABASTER 

Old Durham staggered out into the snow 
Helped by the proud unbending trunks of trees 
Up toward the place where there should be a doe 
White as the snowflakes of a Winter breeze. 
And then the images came back again — 
The irksome man came striding into his brain 
And the white woman lay upon the ground. 
Then something flashed. He fell without a sound. 



